5 things we learned in our voice technology report

Voice technologies are on the rise and this appears to be a good time to jump into a space that is growing and maturing for media companies.

As part of Local Media Association’s latest Innovation Report, we talked to three media companies — Saga Communications, GateHouse Media and Graham Media — to find how they are exploring in this space. We also visited with experts who have invested in technology for the industry in this space.

Here are five things you will learn in our report:

Develop a workflow that will support updated news throughout the day in the areas your audience is expecting from you. Graham Media established a workflow that allowed it to take content it was creating throughout the day for its broadcast and intelligently repurpose it for Alexa.

The revenue opportunities are many: Sponsorships, pre and mid roll and host read. It’s early and experimentation will determine the right path. Many of the companies are viewing this the time to build audience and discover the right revenue path. Many aren’t too worried about having revenue tomorrow. Others have toyed around with sponsorships being read before content starts.

Getting in now will set publishers up for subscription opportunities when that technology comes. As subscriptions continue to become an incredibly important part of a publisher’s business, many are hopeful technology will be developed which will allow promotions to be connected to individual articles or broadcasts that will encourage a listener to buy some form of a subscription.

There are obvious content paths that media companies could run down, like news and weather. Think about the usefulness of the content. While some use these devices to just listen to the news many are after very specific things, i.e. they want to know what the weather is. Consider how useful your content can be in helping answering questions listeners might have.